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Coronavirus latest news: death toll in Italy passes 20,000; more than 1.87m cases reported worldwide
Coronavirus latest news: death toll in Italy passes 20,000; more than 1.87m cases reported worldwide
(32 minutes later)
Spain records another drop in daily death toll; Singapore sees biggest daily jump in infections; China reports highest daily cases in over five weeks
Spain records another drop in daily death toll; Singapore sees biggest daily jump in infections; China reports highest daily cases in over five weeks
Hi, Helen Sullivan with you now.
Trump is being asked now about his powers over states.
I’ll be reporting the latest from the White House press conference, where as I type US President Donald Trump is repeatedly calling a reporter “disgraceful”.
My colleague Maanvi Singh is ready again with a fact check:
The Brazilian government has banned non-indigenous people from entering tribal lands to stop the spread of the virus in their villages and will distribute masks, gloves, test kits and food to their communities, officials have said.
“I have the ultimate authority” to re-open the country and scale back distancing measures, Trump claimed. He was wrong.
The pandemic has raised fears of the risks posed to Brazil’s 850,000 indigenous people by the virus because they have no defence against diseases brought from outside and many live in communal houses where physical distancing is not possible.
That is not correct. University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck has countered that: “The president has no formal legal authority to categorically override local or state shelter-in-place orders or to reopen schools and small businesses.”
So far, health authorities have reported three deaths of indigenous people, including a 15-year-old youth from the vast reservation where 25,000 Yanomami live on the border with Venezuela.
Trump himself has said that state governors are — and should be — ultimately responsible for managing state shelter-in-place orders.
Indigenous groups across South America have been blockading their villages in an effort to escape the outbreak.
When previously asked about whether he would issue a national stay at home order, the president repeatedly deferred to the governors.
Last week, the Guardian reported that a Yanomami had reportedly died after contracting Covid-19.
Today, the governors of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Delaware and Connecticut announced they had formed a regional advisory council. New York governor Andrew Cuomo said each state would name a public health official and an economic development official to serve on a working group alongside each governor’s chief of staff to design a “reopening plan” for their states.
Australia’s Treasury has estimated that the country is heading for a 10% unemployment rate. The treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, has been quick to claim that, without the wage subsidy, it was heading to 15%.
Shortly afterward, the states of California, Washington and Oregon announced a similar plan.
Turkey’s parliament has passed a law allowing the release of tens of thousands of prisoners to ease overcrowding in jails and protect detainees from the outbreak, but which critics slammed for excluding those jailed on terrorism charges.
Asked whether he believes the country should be reopened on 1 May, Mnuchin dodges the question and says he knows the president is very keen to reopen the country, and his own advice is to listen to medical professionals and open when it’s safe.
The AK party of the president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his nationalist MHP allies supported the bill, which was accepted with 279 votes for and 51 votes against, the deputy parliament speaker Süreyya Sadi Bilgiç said.
Trump is speaking again. “I think we’re going to – Boom! I think it’s going to go quickly,” he says of whether reopening will happen gradually or all at once. Right before that he said “eventually, eventually” of whether people would be able to return to cinemas, malls and so on.
The UK government’s chief scientific adviser warns the country’s daily death toll is likely to rise this week, before plateauing for potentially two to three weeks, and then declining.
Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin is asked what emergency he needs to leave the press conference for – this was something Trump said.
Sir Patrick Vallance said that the UK is tracking behind Italy, the European country with the highest death toll, and “following the same sort of path”.
Mnuchin says it’s to head to negotiations for a further US$250bn in a bipartisan bill for small business relief.
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) will provide immediate debt service relief to 25 member-countries under its Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust to allow them to focus their scarce resources on fighting the coronavirus pandemic, it has said.
A few minutes ago Trump said:
Its managing director, Kristalina Georgieva, said the executive board has approved the first batch of countries to receive grants to cover their debt service obligations to the IMF for an initial six months.
“We inherited a stockpile where the cupboards were bare,” seeking to blame the Obama administration for a lack of adequate resources tackle the coronavirus pandemic.
She said the CCRT has about $500m (about £400m) in resources, including new pledges of $185m from the UK, $100m from Japan, and undisclosed amounts from China, the Netherlands and others. The IMF is pushing to raise the amount available to $1.4bn.
My colleague Maanvi Singh has her fact check at the ready below:
In the space of a few weeks of lockdown, England has acquired a million-strong network of social volunteers – surpassing demand and prompting speculation: is this a new sign of social solidarity, and can the newly acquired community spirit survive?
At the White House Press Briefing, treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin is speaking now.
The extraordinary popularity of the NHS volunteer scheme, which 750,000 people signed up to using a phone app, three times as many as were expected, has been repeated at the country’s volunteer centres, which have registered an estimated 250,000 extra people in the past few weeks.
“We are ahead of schedule delivering the economic payments... We expect that 80 million hardworking Americans will get the payment this Wednesday.”
Those numbers come on the back of the astonishing rise of informal mutual aid “good neighbour” organisations – hyper-local groups that keep volunteers in touch via social media. There are more than 4,300 such groups connecting an estimated 3 million people.
Back to the US now.
The UK missed three opportunities to be part of an EU scheme to bulk-buy masks, gowns and gloves and has been absent from key talks about future purchases, Daniel Boffey and Robert Booth write, as pressure grows on ministers to protect NHS medics and care workers on the coronavirus frontline.
In case you missed it: earlier today, Bernie Sanders endorsed Joe Biden’s bid for president. The announcement comes five days after Sanders withdrew from the Democratic primary, and the former candidate told his supporters today, “We’ve got to make Trump a one-term president.”
European doctors and nurses are preparing to receive the first of €1.5bn (£1.3bn) worth of personal protective equipment (PPE) within days or a maximum of two weeks through a joint procurement scheme involving 25 countries and eight companies, according to internal EU documents.
A quick break from Trump now.
The EU’s swift work has led to offers of medical equipment, including masks, overalls and goggles, in excess of the number requested, a spokesman for the European commission said. The EU is separately establishing stockpiles within member states, with the first being set up in Romania.
In the UK, The Times is reporting that “British foreign minister Dominic Raab is set to announce on Thursday that the lockdown in the country will stay in place until at least 7 May,” according to Reuters.
Facial protection is going to become the norm in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, a senior World Health Organization (WHO) figure has said. Dr David Nabarro, the WHO’s Covid-19 envoy, said people will need to become accustomed to a “new reality”. He has told the BBC:
We’ll to bring you more on this soon.
The use of masks has been a major feature of the pandemic, with healthcare workers seeking them as part of their protection equipment.
Over and over again, Trump is touting his travel restrictions, which he’s referring to as a “ban on China” as evidence that he acted early, and saved lives. We’ve already fact-checked this claim, below — there’s no evidence that the travel restrictions would have made a difference because they were enacted after the virus was already spreading within the US.
But the WHO does not recommend them for widespread use and has raised concerns there could be a shortage of masks for medical workers if they are bought up by the general public.
Moreover, the administration’s travel policy did not “ban” travel to and from China. Although non-US citizens were prohibited from entering the country if they had traveled to China within the previous two weeks, American citizens, permanent residents and their immediate family members were exempt.
Dr Nabarro added that people’s lifestyles will also need to change as a result of the virus.
Per a New York Times analysis, “Since Chinese officials disclosed the outbreak of a mysterious pneumonialike illness to international health officials on New Year’s Eve, at least 430,000 people have arrived in the United States on direct flights from China, including nearly 40,000 in the two months after President Trump imposed restrictions on such travel, according to an analysis of data collected in both countries.”
Brazil is likely to have 12 times more cases than are being officially reported by the country’s government, with too little testing and long waits to confirm the results, a study suggests.
Trump says “nobody who needed a ventilator didn’t get a ventilator”.
Researchers at a consortium of Brazilian universities and institutes examined the ratio of cases resulting in deaths up to 10 April, considering cases ending in recovery or death while excluding patients still fighting the virus. They then compared that ratio with the expected death rates based on the age of patients from the World Health Organization.
Earlier he said, “Nobody is asking for ventilators.”
The higher-than-expected death rate in Brazil based on the official figures indicates there are many more cases of the virus than are being counted, with the study estimating only 8% of cases are being reported.
Below a fact check from my colleague Maanvi Singh:
Doctors working in emergency and intensive care have been warning that the government is vastly underreporting the figures:
It is true that some states, so far, have ended up with more ventilators than they originally projected they would need. California has loaned 500 ventilators to states like New York. California hospitals managed to increase their stock from 7,500 machines to more than 11,000, according to the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom. “That has put less strain and pressure on the state’s effort to procure additional ventilators,” Newsom said.
Health ministers from the Group of 20 major economies will speak by video conference on 19 April to address the impact of the new coronavirus on the global health sector and society, the Saudi G20 secretariat has said.
However, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a national shortage. The US has roughly 173,000 ventilators, according to the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University. Experts from Harvard Medical School predict that the US could end up needing 31 times that number to treat coronavirus patients.
The meeting follows last month’s virtual meeting of G20 leaders, who tasked the health ministers with sharing national best practices and developing a set of urgent actions for the G20 to jointly combat the pandemic.
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine published on Wednesday 25 March categorically concluded that the US does not have enough ventilators to treat patients with Covid-19 in the coming months.
A member of the crew of the USS Theodore Roosevelt has died 11 days after the aircraft carrier’s captain was fired for pressing his concern that the US Navy had done too little to safeguard his crew.
You can watch the White House task force press briefing live here:
The sailor is the first active-duty military member to die since the start of the outbreak.
France is going through “difficult times”, its president, Emmanuel Macron, has said.
Announcing the extension of the country’s lockdown until 11 May, Macron added:
He said that by 11 May, France will be able to test every citizen presenting symptoms.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, says creches and schools will begin to reopen on 11 May. That date will mark the start of a new phase, he said, but the lockdown will continue until then.
Macron says he will work on a plan to help struggling sectors, such as tourism and leisure, and will extend aid measures for companies and workers. He called on insurance companies to help in the fight to support the country’s economy.
In a speech broadcast on French television, Emmanuel Macron said hope was “beginning to arise again in the fight against coronavirus”.
The French president said efforts to combat the outbreak were beginning to have an effect and admitted that France had not been sufficiently ready for the crisis when it unfolded.
Key developments in the global coronavirus outbreak on Monday include:
The number of deaths from coronavirus in Italy passed 20,000 after they rose by 566 on Monday, 135 more than on Sunday. Almost half of the deaths (280) were registered in Lombardy, the northern region worst affected by the virus.
The confirmed global death toll passed 117,000, and at least 1.8 million people have been infected, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. The tallies are likely to be underestimates.
A total of 11,329 patients have died in UK hospitals after testing positive for coronavirus, the UK’s Department of Health said, up by 717 in 24 hours.
Belgian health authorities reported 303 more deaths in 24 hours, bringing the country’s total death toll from the outbreak to 3,903, meaning its outbreak is proportionally now more deadly than that of Italy.
Singapore recorded its biggest daily jump in infections, with 386 more cases in the past 24 hours, taking its total to 2,918 cases. A large number of the new cases are linked to outbreaks in migrant workers’ dormitories.
German experts recommended recommended a gradual relaxing of restrictions, as long as new infections stabilise and hygiene measures to control the spread of the virus are maintained.
The head of the World Health Organization urged caution over moves to lift lockdown conditions. He said much was still unknown about the virus and that finding, testing and isolating cases was still crucial.
The US is nearing the peak of its outbreak, according to the director of the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, Robert Redfield, who told NBC: “You’ll know when you’re at the peak when the next day is actually less than the day before. We are stabilising right now.”
The UK will not ease lockdown this week, said to the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, who added that it was “still far too early”, and that the UK would be getting ahead of itself if ministers relaxed restrictions before medical experts advised them to.
Spain saw another fall in its overnight death toll, down by 102 to 517 in 24 hours, bringing the total to 17,489, the country’s health ministry said, adding that it was the smallest proportional daily increase since tracking began.
Iran’s death toll rose by 111 to 4,585, a health ministry official said, adding that the total number of infected cases had reached 73,303 in the most affected Middle Eastern country.
Brazil’s health minister has publicly defied President Jair Bolsonaro over coronavirus, accusing him of sowing doubt in Brazilian minds over the need for physical distancing, Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro reports.
In a Sunday night interview with Brazil’s most-watched television network, Luiz Henrique Mandetta signalled that Bolsonaro’s insistence on snubbing health ministry distancing recommendations was confusing the country’s 210 million citizens.
“They don’t know whether to listen to the health minister or to the president,” Mandetta said. He urged Bolsonaro’s administration to present “a single, united line” on how to tackle the pandemic.
In a clear dig at Bolsonaro’s repeated defiance of distancing guidelines, Mandetta said: “When you see people going into bakeries, to supermarkets … this is clearly something that is wrong.”
The death toll from coronavirus in Brazil currently stands at 1,269, while 22,720 confirmed cases have been reported so far.
Former military agents convicted of serious human rights violations under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile could be freed by a controversial new ruling that seeks to halt the spread of the coronavirus among the country’s prison population, reports John Bartlett in Santiago.
An urgent bill proposed by the ministry of justice would release some 1,300 low-risk prisoners from overcrowded prisons to serve out their sentences securely under house arrest.
The measure would apply to people convicted of lesser crimes who are elderly, pregnant, have children younger than two years of age, or are terminally ill – as long as they have already served at least half of their sentences.
But 14 government senators have argued that should also apply to inmates at the infamous Punta Peuco prison – a comfortable facility housing about 70 inmates convicted of dictatorship-era human rights violations.
The proposed amendment has divided the ruling Chile Vamos coalition and prompted a fierce opposition backlash. Lorena Pizarro, the spokeswoman for the Association for the Families of Disappeared Detainees, said:
According to data from the coronavirus tracker maintained by Johns Hopkins University, Chile has reported 7,525 confirmed cases of coronavirus, and 82 deaths.
The world’s shortest woman has taken to the streets in central India to call on people to stay at home after police appealed for help enforcing a coronavirus lockdown, AFP reports.
Jyoti Amge, who is 62.8cm (24.7in) tall, encouraged people to wash their hands and wear a mask and gloves when they leave their homes as she made appearances across Nagpur city in Maharashtra state on Monday.
The 26-year-old told AFP:
Amge has achondroplasia and was certified the world’s shortest woman by Guinness World Records.
